Warriors fans: You get the credit for the $450M Cohan ousting

* Incoming Warriors owner Joseph Lacob is talking, but apparently he’s not doing the columnist thing yet, which is fine. At some point, he will have to answer pointed, detailed questions (can you go into the luxury tax? do you plan to clean house? if not, why in the hell not?).

Or else he’ll be called on it. But I understand that, for now, he and Peter Guber want to bask in the purchase, give upbeat answers, and let the situation play out for a couple weeks. They spent $450M. They’re not yet officially the owners. They’re due some de-compression time. Some.

-How could the Warriors sell for an announced $450M when they’re one of the NBA’s perennial losers?

Because of their fans. Simple as that.

How could this possibly get into a bidding war and produce a record amount, when other NBA sales situations are dying to attract strong interest at all?

It’s because of the acknowledged value and passion of the Warriors’ fans.

How could Cohan shrug off Larry Ellison’s hot pursuit and hand it to his more-preferred bidders?

In many ways, it’s because Warriors fans have invested so much value into this franchise that, at some point, even a proven failuire like Cohan apparently could name his price and practically select his own buyer.

That is something.

As everybody in the league has known for years, the Warriors are a potential goldmine, if only somebody smart could ever end up running the place.

(The team definitely was a goldmine for Cohan, who made money through a majority of his ownership and now pockets a $320M paper profit from a 16-year hold, though I’d imagine the IRS will be eyeing this windfall very closely.)

The point: If Cohan could run the franchise this poorly for this long and still fill the arena and still pull in solid TV ratings and still boss around the cable network…

And still register an annual profit… then anybody with a brain can imagine what could happen if ownership actually knew what it was doing.

That’s a nod to Warriors fans, who kept coming out, kept clicking on the internet links, kept watching the games on TV and, finally, turned up and kept up the pressure on Cohan to get smart or get out.

I don’t know if this team was worth $450M on a long-term, realistic spreadsheet. And I don’t know that $450M is the actual purchase price, weeding out normal auctioneer over-statement.

But if you ranked the NBA teams for what they’d be worth on an open market, the Warriors would be in the top 10, easily. Even without owning their own arena, by the way.

That’s largely because of there are lots of rich people in the Bay Area, sure.

But mostly, that’s because there is such a tremendous range of support for this team–demographically, different economic strata, consistently, fervently.

If Cohan isn’t sure he can get more than $400M (a belief I questioned persistently, I admit) maybe he never puts the team up for sale.

But he knew he could get $450M, I guess, with some special assistance/info from his auctioneer. So up for sale they went.

Cohan also has had his IRS troubles hanging over his head for a while, though I never thought he had to sell the team only because of that.

I’ve heard that, in the end, Cohan probably won’t have to pay anything close to the numbers the federal government is chasing.

But there’s more to this fan angle: Cohan saw the attendance numbers finally starting to drift over the last season and a half.

The numbers weren’t falling off a cliff like in Sacramento, Indiana and other places, but what if the decay continued, quickened, and the distrust of Cohan eventually led to outright abandonment by this incredible hoops fan base?

I think that’s what David Stern saw, and feared. I think Cohan eventually realized that if there was an annual erosion of, say, 15% attendance, he would see the value of the team fall precipitously.

At the end of the 2008-’09 season, as Robert Rowell was in his final, total ascendance, I wrote a column suggesting that the only way for Warriors fans to nudge Cohan out was to stop going to games.

I immediately was contacted by someone smart with high contacts who said that was the stupidest thing I could say–that crumbling attendance would help nobody and would hurt those trying to save the franchise the most.

I think we were both right, in very different ways.

The big crowds helped Cohan sell, no question. The continued strong attendance, even through last season, in a recession, kept the value of the team way up.

But I think the vigor of the anger directed at Cohan became a palpable thing, too. It was starting to manifest in the dropping attendance, but it was bigger than that.

He never recovered from being booed at the 2000 All-Star Game, which is why Cohan ducked from public view pretty much ever since.

He couldn’t avoid it forever, though. He couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there. He owned a valuable property, but was reviled for the way he owned it.

That was never going away. The players were never going to respect Cohan or Rowell. Good coaches and executives were either going to refuse to consider coming to the Warriors, or, like Don Nelson, force Cohan into massive overpayment.

The end had come… Cohan was never going to get his reputation back, but he could make the money, if he sold NOW.

So you add up that the Warriors were incredibly valuable because of their huge fan base, and that the fan base was in jeopardy, finally, because things had reached a breaking point…

And that’s what led to Cohan selling, and getting a record price. The fans can breathe easier, knowing that, more than any recent franchise sale I can think of, they drove this process.